Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell at Belmont University. (Obligatory Caveat: Since it’s a private university, Belmont should be legally permitted to hire/fire whom it pleases, for whatever reasons it pleases. And I’m free to criticize them for it.)

ICE seizes domains of hip-hop blogs, won’t say why. And no, ICE isn’t the name of a rival hip-hop artist.

I missed these when they came out, and I still haven’t looked them over yet, but you can find the first full year of data from Maryland’s SWAT transparency bill here. I wrote about the first six-month report here.

Harry Reid jumps on board the Internet gambling bandwagon. There’s a lesson here for the money-corrupts-politics crowd: Reid only switched because of support from the Vegas bricks-and-mortar casinos. Which goes to show that money can have a good influence as well as a bad one. I’ll take a corrupt congressman who votes correctly over a pure-hearted legislator who consistently gives us terrible laws. (Not saying Reid fits either description.)

Terrible story out of Long Beach, California, where police shot and kill a man holding a water nozzle. No announcement, no order to drop the thing. Just shooting.

A vice squad in SWAT gear returned fire, hitting Awtry with multiple rounds in his arm and thumb … which was followed by a 20-minute standoff between cops and players, according to a spokesman for the Greenville County Sheriff’s Department. Both shooting victims were taken to the hospital where they are in stable condition.

There were 12 people and Awtry in the house at 502 Pine Knoll Drive when police arrived at about 9:20 pm last night. According to frontline witnesses, they had just finished a small buy-in dinnertime tourney … and a 1/2 cash game was just getting underway when someone saw 5-0 approaching on a security monitor. Before he could clearly vocalize an alert, a battery ram begin slamming the front door and players froze. Awtry, who players say has notoriously bad hearing in his senior years and presumably believed the game was being robbed, began shooting at the door with his pistol, firing “at least once” according to a player, “multiple shots” according to police. At least four officers returned fire at the door with at least 20 bullets from their higher-powered assault weapons.

As Awtry fell back into the poker room entryway, he balked, “Why didn’t you tell me it was the cops?”

Local news coverage of the raid here. Police seized about $5,000 in cash. Everyone but Awtry was issued a $100 fine. Ironically, both the South Carolina Supreme Court and state legislature may soon clarify the state’s confusing laws about private poker games.

This is far from the first time police have brought the SWAT team to a poker game. Reason.tv covered a similar raid at on a charity poker game hosted by an American Legion post in Dallas.

Federal prosecutors in Washington State look to seize assets of online payment service that works with poker sites. Good to Obama’s DOJ has straightened out the priorities of the previous administration.

Last month, Washington State’s Supreme Court upheld the state’s ban on online poker, which puts playing online in the same class of crimes as child molestation, arson, and kidnapping. Here’s reaction from a poker player who recently moved there.

John McWhorter: Ending the drug war will do more to help black Americans than marching.

The good news is that an online gambling legalization bill is slowly gaining momentum. The bad news comes in reading about how it’s happening, when you see just how ugly Washington sausage making really is.

At the time I am writing, there is 53% of the debate’s participants that think that there should be NO legal restrictions on gambling. So I conclude that for Radley Balko and 53% of the participants the following points are not very important problems in comparison with the benefits that society can get from a lack of restrictions or with the sacrosanct idea of freedom.

If there are no restrictions, I think that there are going to be special slots machines for kids in front of every school and a large amount of money to spend in advertising gambling to children. A lot of children are going to become gambling addicts and the gambling industry is going to make a lot of money when they grow up and began earning money. Besides, gambling is going to depreciate the value of money in their minds. 10 euros is nothing because if you are lucky you can win 1,000,000 euros or more by gambling these 10 euros… but in real life 10 euros is more than 1 hour of hard work in a lot of developed countries or 10 days of toil in others.

I grew up in the country side of France and I was 22 when I first entered a casino with some previous exposure to the dangers of gambling. Then, I haven’t become an addict and have gambled less than 3 times in the 8 following years. Now I am living in Colombia where they don’t have the means to tightly control gambling. I can see slot machines in every small grocery in the working-class suburbs where I live and who is gambling? Adults, but also 12 year-olds that seem to be already addicted. When I see that, I assure you that I am happy to have grown up in a country that have the means and the rules to not show me these slot machines when I was that age.

But for Radley Balko, these problems don’t seem very important and I am just amazed that 53% of the participants think like him…

I’m fine with letting elementary school-age children gamble, but only if they’re also legally permitted to drink. It would be cruel to let them wager away their allowance, but then deny them the sweet, melancholy ritual of drowning their sorrows in beer.